A Town Unlike Alice
Betty and Cathy have brought Alice to feed the ducks and geese.
It is Christmas: “Nice to stretch our legs. It's very cold mind.”
A thorn's red berries glow, too bright for Alice, her eyes wince.
She sees the marsh as a charnel house stuck about with ribbed, russet
dead dock stems, with seedless hay and fluffy ashes,
she feels herself interviewed by its “Demon King”.
“Demon King” is a name for Alice's sensation of a Voice,
it attacks, challenges, ridicules her and taunts
Alice for missing her dead mother, wanting her.
“Your mother is dead. This is my realm. Stay here
among the dead and in the cold, if you really want her.”
“Alice? I said look, there are two cormorants.”
Alice looks but as she looks the Demon Voice speaks:
“You seem singularly ill informed about your needs,
you come here, make all this noise, annoy the dead... !”
“Gee whiz, they're starving!” Betty throws bread
into the seamless, gun metal element that rolls off oiled
feathers, breasts and beaks, smoothly and seamlessly reknits.
Coots dart amongst ducks, live, hot, intent
on bread. “You could jump in, although you wouldn't last
a minute, because the temperature is freezing.”
But Cathy offers cigarettes and Alice starts
and then takes one, sparks it up. That grace
has saved her life. She's still dry, shivering on the canal edge.
Would she have jumped or been pushed? She shakes.
“Alice, you're shivering! It's getting dark,
borrow my gloves Alice, walk to warm yourself.”
Faint mockeries persist although they're walking home,
and the growing darkness hurts as the “Demon King”
calls out: “You never knew the woman you called Mum!”